An artist among walkers, a walker among artists: Hamish Fulton is an outlandish and inspiring figure. For almost five decades he has covered between 30 and 50 miles a day, depending on the terrain, in all weathers. From Soho to Saskatchewan, from his home in Kent to the peaks of Nepal, he has trekked, hiked and trudged the world in solitude. His object is to unite two apparently incongruous activities: walking and art.

by Carys Lake-edwards

ARTIST RE-VISITED

Fulton is interested in exercising total artistic freedom, which he infuses with environmentalism and reverence for nature, not to mention a general dismay for what he sees as a growing disconnect between humans and the natural world. The first time Fulton picked up a camera was quite accidental, being a trained sculptor, but Fulton had the idea of developing an artistic activity based on the act of walking; whereby the walks themselves become the artworks, as the camera documents the land. It was his interest in the landscape and the experience of the journeys that called for photography as his medium, more than the commonly accepted practices of traditional landscape painting.

Fulton came of age in the late Sixties as one of a number of artists - including Richard Long and Gilbert & George - who were exploring new forms of sculpture and landscape art at Central St. Martin’s School of Art, London. It was a golden age of innovation for contemporary art, expanding ideas about what artworks could be, and a central characteristic of their practice was a direct physical engagement with landscape. Fulton's time as a fine art student followed by travels in South Dakota and Montana in 1969, encouraged him to think that art could be 'how you view life', and not tied necessarily to the production of objects.

Over the course of a walk, Fulton takes notes in a journal to help provide the text for the photos he later creates. Up to this point, both the photograph and text are equally important to the finished image. Sometimes a photograph will have words written across or below it, like: A Walk to the Summit of Popocatepetl Mexico One Night Bivouac on the Crater rim (1990). The words are purely informative. In huge capital letter they tell you the location of the place, whilst the rest is left to the imagination, the personal thoughts of the artist at the moment he takes the shot are unknown. You know where you are, you know what you're looking at. But just imagine the feat of getting up there!

Least said, most imagined: that might be one way of describing Fulton's art and the way it stimulates the mind. Or to quote his own account of what he makes: "Facts for the walker, fictions for the viewer." Over the years, Fulton has found a number of ways of condensing his experience but more often that not, it remains opaque (take the long open road in Untitled, Spain (1990) for example): what does it mean to him (or us) that this set of distances appears in graphic text? And sometimes, when the work is especially terse, you find yourself registering little more than his stamina (1,055 miles in 21 days from north to southern Spain).

Fulton allows us to connect with nature in that we contemplate its vastness with every one of his walking feats. The dedication with which he treats his occupation has been highlighted in exhibitions around the globe and his photographs have ended up in collections from Tate Britain to the British Council and the Victoria and Albert Museum, to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

He still walks to this day and has no intention of stopping. On his life’s work, the artist has commented; “where I live, people say, 'oh, he’s off on one of his strolls again’. “I like the joke, but the reality is, I made a decision when I was in my twenties to do this, and I honour that commitment” . - Hamish Fulton.

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